DailyDirt: Adapting To A TL;DR Future

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

With the ever growing amount of content to read/watch/hear, humans are going to need to figure out much more efficient ways to consume information. Speed reading will only get us so far, and then we're going to have to rely on ways to filter out irrelevant stuff so we can focus more on just the things that we really need to see. Here are just a few early attempts to get computers to help us out with information overload.

• Clipped is a software tool that tries to extract key bits of information from long pieces of text. Tanay Tandon, a 15yo kid, created it and also filed a patent for his algorithm.... [url]
• TLDR is a browser plug-in that tries to create short summaries for articles. These algorithms aren't perfect, but then again, neither is human comprehension. [url]
• Another teenager wrote news-summarizing software and raised $1 million for it. It was originally called Trimmit, but now it's Summly -- and 16yo Nick D'Alosio is looking for some "serious scientists" to help him improve his algorithms with that VC funding. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

Filed Under: algorithms, automation, information overload, software, summaries, td;dr